


Catching Lightning

by swallowthewhale



Category: High School Musical (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 14:31:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4832732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swallowthewhale/pseuds/swallowthewhale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Polish her glasses, buy her ruby slippers, take her to prom! I don't know! Just do it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catching Lightning

Sharpay says it so casually that Kelsi almost doesn’t notice. Then her mind replays it and she turns to Ryan slowly. His eyes are wide.

“Sharpay _told you_ to bring me to prom?”

“Kelsi,” Ryan says desperately.

“No.” She backs away. “I thought we were done with this. I really did.”

She doesn’t run, her heels are too high for that, but she walks as quickly as she can, biting her lip to hold back the tears. Troy and Chad try to stop her, but she barely notices them calling her name.

She should have known, really. Ryan is pretty confidant but she should have realized that the way he asked, more like told actually, was not Ryan at all. It was Sharpay. Whatever Sharpay had wanted, she used Ryan to get it. An old move, and one that Ryan had gotten pretty good at resisting since the Humuhumu thing last summer. Not anymore, apparently.

Kelsi realizes that she hasn’t been paying attention to where she was going and has ended up on the rooftop garden, the worst-kept secret in the whole school. It’s almost 80 degrees outside, but she’s shivering. She grips the wall and takes a deep breath, determined not to cry.

Suddenly, there’s a jacket over her shoulders and she knows without looking that it’s Ryan.

“Kelsi,” he starts, clearly having thought about what he’s going to say already. “Sharpay wanted me to get Troy and Gabriella’s duet for her. Nothing new, of course.”

She can hear him swallow.

“She suggested a bunch of ways of charming it out of you. One of which being taking you to prom. I wasn’t going to do it. I told her I wasn’t going to do it. And then I realized that I would be an idiot for passing up the opportunity to take you to prom. It’s a once in a lifetime kind of thing that I didn’t want to miss.”

“So you only asked because Sharpay put the idea in your head?”

“No,” Ryan admits.

Startled, Kelsi turns to face him.

“But I was pretty sure you didn’t want to go, probably not with me, if at all. But when Sharpay suggested it, it seemed more possible.”

“And the song?”

Ryan just smiles and holds out his hand, “Can I have this dance?”

Kelsi stares at him just long enough for it to become awkward before she places her hand in his.

Ryan leads her through a simple waltz and after a minute he rests his head next to hers and sings, “It’s like catching lightning, the chances of finding someone like you. It’s one in a million, the chances of feeling the way we do.”

Kelsi feels like crying again. It’s the song they had written just days earlier for the musical’s version of prom. The song that Sharpay wanted. The song that Kelsi had written for Ryan, because he wanted a waltz for the prom. And more than that, the song Kelsi wrote about Ryan.

“So with every step together, we just keep on getting better. So can I have this dance? Can I have this dance?”


End file.
